Nazism, poetry and the political

Heidegger and Nazism: the issues are so contentious, so overdetermined by contemporary intellectual politics, and some of the concerns so horrific that this is a topic about which it is probably impossible to think straight. The controversy takes the form of a now slightly familiarly scandal stirred to new life every decade or so, especially in France, notably with a book by Victor Farias in the late 1980s (Farias 1989), and again in 2005 with the publication of Emmanuel Feye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (Feye 2009). Farias’s argument that Heidegger was a Nazi throughout his life and his work thoroughly fascist is easy to dismiss, as is Feye’s case that Heidegger’s whole oeuvre is essentially Nazi thinking. Less dismissible is evidence gleaned by other scholars, notably Hugo Ott (1993), revealing the extent and depth of Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis in the 1930s. This refutes some of Heidegger’s own defensive self-presentations on these issues.